Very often the naysayers of social media will point to the vacuous nature of connections online. Friend does not mean an actual friend etc. We are also restricted as human in how many people we can successfully know and stay in touch with. We are though in a position where we are able to share who we are and what we do, and make it available to anyone who finds it useful. We may all have a mental model of our relationships and who matters, who influences us and who we mentor in life. Social media has brought us the ability to visualise and data mine those relationships. (It has also allowed others/businesses etc to look at those and use them commercially).
Linkedin has started a project to show your professional links to people and it produces very organic looking social media graphs, this is my one from my profile connections
When you create it you also get to label the coloured groupings which are roughly people in certain types of network. I have lots of virtual world and tech people in my network both from my corporate career colleagues and from other places and a little spin out cloud of media people and one directly related to WImbledon.
Visualizing data like this and being able to navigate around it does start to inform and provide a check and balance for your mental model.
The application is available here
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